Which Keir Starmer are we supposed to be worried about? Is it the Sir Sleepy who the Tories attacked at the start of this week for apparently being too old for the job? Or the ruthless one busy purging the left wingers from his party, the one who is covertly raiding pensions, or the one who doesn’t have a plan? Those are just four of the attack lines that the Conservatives have launched on the Labour leader in the first few days of the election campaign. They seem to be holding their brainstorm about how to attack Starmer in public.
In 1997, the Conservatives under John Major tried to take chunks out of Tony Blair, all to little avail. They wanted to drag voters’ memories back to the 1980s when Labour was unelectable, putting up huge billboard posters with a pair of red eyes peering out from the dark recesses of a purse. “NEW LABOUR, NEW DANGER,” they read. The public bought the New Labour brand in the first line, and not the Conservatives’ warning in the second.
The Tories couldn’t settle on an attack line, moving from the then Labour leader being a lightweight to him being a dangerous left-wing ideologue. Some of these lines had purchase, others less so, but none of them were really tried for long enough to have any effect. It was the political equivalent of someone who moves from one fad diet to another every three or four weeks.
Starmer is not Blair. He’s not as good or as charismatic as his predecessor. But he doesn’t need to be because Rishi Sunak isn’t as good as John Major, who had after all managed to win the 1992 election against the odds. The only thing more confusing than the myriad Tory attacks on Labour is the multitudes within Sunak himself. Few of his own MPs and allies know what he stands for.
Perhaps he doesn’t recognise how sclerotic his party’s campaign is because he has been rebranding himself constantly since he became leader. He has never seen out a persona for longer than a month either, so why not flit around with the attacks on his opponent?
Sunak has produced a 2024 tribute to the scary purse from 1997, with a photoshop of Starmer dressed up as a robber with a swag bag and a caption reading “Starmer’s Retirement Tax: They raided pensions before, it’ll happen again.” But isn’t this the Labour leader who is too sleepy to mount such a raid and who doesn’t have a plan anyway? Never mind: there will be another new attack next week.
The most consistent attack line we’ve heard so far is that Labour doesn’t have a plan. That is what Conservative frontbenchers were instructed to say for the past few months whenever they were giving broadcast interviews or answering questions in the House of Commons. Got problems with your childcare policy? Labour doesn’t have a plan. Not spending enough on defence? But Labour doesn’t have a plan.
Work and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride, who made a conscientious objection to “Sir Sleepy” on the basis that the two men were in the same age group, decided to stick with this attack as the campaign got going, calling Starmer “No Idea Keir”.
David Cameron, who didn’t even want Sunak to call the election now, is doing his best to mop up the mess of this campaign and gave the only coherent summary of what the Tories stand for when he was interviewed by broadcasters, saying: “In the end elections are not a referendum on the government. They’re a choice, and you can see a real choice opening up: of keeping the pension out of tax with the Conservatives or a retirement tax with Labour; an exciting plan for national service to bring the country together under the Conservatives, no plans under Keir Starmer.”
At least Cameron could offer a sense that there was a Tory plan for something: this has always been lacking in the “no plan” attack until now. But none of the Tories seem to have remembered the most effective attack on Starmer, which is that he too contains multitudes and will tend to alight on whatever is convenient to him at the time, rather than sticking with his beliefs.
They only need remind the electorate that this leader campaigned for Jeremy Corbyn in 2019, and that he dropped key pledges on tuition fees and so on when they were no longer useful. How, they should argue, can you trust what this man says now?
Sunak himself spent many a Prime Minister’s Questions making just that attack. He seems to have forgotten it now, just at the very point where the Tories should have alighted on one attack and be prosecuting it relentlessly.
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